Hideo Kojima and Sony are temporarily separating, and Kojima's next two games will be published by Xbox. Now the famed visionary clarifies some details on what happened behind the scenes.
After supporting Death Stranding 1 & 2, Sony has now opted not to publish Hideo Kojima's next games. This has led to a breakup of sorts between Kojima and Sony after decades of working together. Sony was originally set to publish Kojima's new Metal Gear successor PHYSINT, but that deal fell apart.
Kojima has now flipped sides to join with Xbox, and Microsoft's games division will publish both of KojiPro's new games; the spine-tingling OD and the tactical espionage sim PHYSINT. Kojima has revealed new details on what happened, confirming that Sony abruptly cancelled PHYSINT with no warning back in June.
"As confirmed earlier through our official channels, in mid-June of this year, we unexpectedly received notice from PlayStation Studios that they would cancel the PHYSINT project."
There have not been any details associated with costs, but that's believed to be the main reason Sony passed on PHYSINT; back in 2025, Kojima confirmed a cast of characters for the game that would be played by real actors, implying that PHYSINT would be a big-budget affair with complex motion capture similar to the Death Stranding games, which were an expensive duology to produce.
"PHYSINT is an important project both to me personally and to KOJIMA PRODUCTIONS," Kojima said.
"Determined to keep the project alive, we have spent the last three months searching tirelessly for a new partner.
"In the course of seeking advice and pursuing negotiations with people across many fields, we found in XBOX a partner with whom we share a common vision for the future, and we have decided to team up with them once again. Please rest assured that development of PHYSINT, our genre-defining action-espionage title, is ongoing and will continue moving forward."
This is the second time that Hideo Kojima has found himself in this position; the first was back in 2015 when Konami abruptly fired Kojima, cancelled his in-production horror game Silent Hills, and essentially cast Kojima out into the wild.
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The dev went on to create Kojima Productions, an independent game dev studio located right in Japan, and has managed to stay out of the clutches of corporate ownership.
